It is time for Zorba to start meditating, and it is time for the people who are meditators not to allow themselves to escape from the world... Only in completion is there bliss. Only in completion have you come home.
Osho

Friday, 22 November 2013

If you are in a relationship, you might think that you are more emotionally healthy than your partner, or that your partner is more emotionally healthy than you. But we are attracted to each other at our common level of woundedness, as well as our common level of health.

When trust is broken, it does not need to be the end of a relationship. Much can be learned from staying in a relationship and learning from the conflict situation. This article tells of how, through the practice of Inner Bonding, two people mended trust when one was unfaithful.

Dylan and Hannah were to be married in a month when Hannah found out that Dylan had been cheating on her with another woman. Devastated, she ended their relationship.

Dylan was also devastated. He really loved Hannah and had no idea why he had been having an affair with a woman who meant nothing to him. Fortunately, Dylan reached out for help and started phone sessions with me. In the course of his Inner Bonding work, he discovered deep feelings of worthlessness from a highly abusive childhood. He had learned to define his worth through women and sex, and was addicted to the validation he received from women. He had no idea how to fill and validate himself and was driven to appease his fear and anxiety through sex with multiple women.

Dylan also discovered that he was terrified of being controlled due to his angry and controlling mother, and having an affair was a way to protect himself from this fear. Hannah frequently used anger as a way to have her way and Dylan had never learned how to stand up for himself, having learned to be a caretaker for his parents. Withdrawing into his addiction was the only way he knew of not being controlled.

While Dylan believed in God, he had no connection with a personal source of spiritual guidance. As he learned and began to practice the six steps of Inner Bonding and developed his spiritual connection, Dylan began to fill up from the inside instead of having always to fill up from the outside. Dylan was diligent regarding his Inner Bonding practice and within a short time, he knew that his sexual addiction was behind him. He had no more desire to act out sexually. He loved Hannah and just wanted to be with her.

Dylan was also healing the old guilt from his parents' blame and abuse. He was learning to stand up for himself rather let himself be controlled, to speak his truth rather than comply out of fear and guilt to another's demands.

At this point, he contacted Hannah. She was still hurt and furious and had no trust in him at all. However, she still loved him, and was confused about what to do. Her family and friends advised her to stay away, but she heard something new in Dylan's voice that compelled her to open up a bit. She started phone sessions with me as well.

"I love him but how can I ever trust him again?" she asked over and over. Instead of working on trusting Dylan, we worked on Hannah learning to trust herself. As we went back through the relationship, it became apparent to Hannah that she had been ignoring the inner promptings that told her something was wrong. She had not trusted her own inner knowing. Out of fear of conflict, she had let many events go by that, if she would have confronted them, would have shed light on the problems much earlier. Instead of speaking her truth, she had learned to get angry as a way to protect against her fears of rejection. Hannah worked on developing her spiritual connection with a source of guidance that helped her begin to trust her inner knowing. As she stopped abandoning herself and learned how to take care of herself so that she no longer needed to control Dylan to feel safe, her anger subsided.

Meanwhile, Dylan went about proving his trustworthiness. He was not only attentive and kind to Hannah, he became generous and kind with various members of his family, from whom he had previously distanced.

After a few months of individual work, Hannah and Dylan began to work together in their phone sessions with me. They learned to open and explore their conflicts and learn from them instead of Hannah getting angry and Dylan complying and withdrawing. In shifting their intent from protecting against pain to learning about love, Hannah and Dylan developed a loving relationship based on trust for themselves and each other. They are now married with children and their relationship continues to evolve in love and trust.

Trust is built in a relationship when both people are open to learning rather than controlling through anger, withdrawal, compliance or resistance. When our intention is to control rather than to learn about what is loving to ourselves and our partner, we can never trust or feel secure with our partner, because if we can control and manipulate him or her, others can too - and that's scary. Only when we believe our partner is with us because he or she wants to be - out of desire and caring, rather than out of fear, obligation, or guilt - will we feel secure and trusting. This only occurs when our intent is to learn about loving ourselves and others rather than to control.

The more we trust ourselves - our own inner knowing and the wisdom from our spiritual guidance - the more open and trusting we can be with our partner. People often hold back from being open with their partners with the implication, "I can't be open until you prove that I can trust you." By trust they mean being able to predict their partners' response, guaranteeing that their partners will be loving rather than rejecting. One of life's hardest realities is that this kind of guarantee is impossible. However, the more we trust ourselves and develop our ability to speak our truth, the more we are willing to be open and risk another's free response to us. This is what creates a loving and trusting relationship.

We all want connection. We don't want to feel alone and lonely and we have many addictions to avoid these feelings. Yet the moment we connect with Spirit and with ourselves, we do not feel alone, and then we can manage the loneliness when we are not connected with others. Today, do not leave your inner child alone. Bring the love of Spirit to your Self so that you can manage the times of loneliness.

Wednesday, 13 November 2013

RECENT RESEARCH HAS NOW ESTABLISHED that thinking too much can rot the brain. What they have yet to discover is that meditation is the key to the "off" button.

The Economist puts it perfectly: "Just as hard labor leaves marks on the hands, hard thinking leaves marks on the brain."

And medical research has known for some time that the brain is a malleable organ: the brains of sportsmen look different from computer users.

In the 1960's, research at University of California at Berkeley showed that rats brought up in a stimulating environment had denser, more complex brains than those in boring environments. Even old rats put in a more interesting cage show the same changes in their brains, with more synaptic connections between the cells supporting the old adage of "use it or lose it."

Not only do the brain cells increase, but the blood supply which brings the needed energy sources increase too. So, not only do "young interested rats develop 20-25 more synapses per nerve cell than do their bored contemporaries," but also they have "80% more capillaries" to supply the energy-bearing blood.

Recent research by William Greenough and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign subjected three sets of rats --"acrobats," "jocks," and "couch potatoes" to different environments--with the acrobats challenged by tasks that required coordination, the jocks just challenged physically, and the couch potatoes not challenged at all. The acrobats showed dramatic changes to the parts of the brain involved with coordination.

But what about overdoing it? It is also known that thinking too much can kill brain cells. It appears that chemicals excreted by thinking cells may not be cleared away quickly enough and may poison and kill the brain cells.

When Ruben Gur at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia asked men he was studying to relax, they could not -- their brains kept banging away at whatever they had been doing before without their being aware of it. Essentially this means, like all non-meditators, they were unaware of their thinking.

By contrast, women shifted to thinking about something completely different, using a different part of their brain. This difference, he believes, may explain his other main finding, which is that men's brains rot a lot faster than women's. Despite their big head start, by the age of 45, with their attention span and memory failing, the front of the men's brains which is responsible for "complex thinking" has shrunk to same size as "the frontal lobes of women of the same age." Alzheimer Lite all round for the boys.

So, not surprisingly, the brain works very much like the rest of our biological system. Rest between periods of exertion -- is the natural way of functioning. Lack of rest will cause over-training in athletes and reduce their function...the same is obviously true of the brain. And there is an intriguing relationship between awareness of breath and the fatigue that precedes heart attacks in stressed patients, over-training in athletes, and the chronic fatigue syndrome in others.... And while at least the athletes muscles rest while he or she sleeps, our multimedia brains do not. They switch over to a picture show called dreams, which in stressed, tense people can be quite a horror show.

Similarly it is not surprising that other investigators are increasingly recognizing a connection between alertness and function on the one hand, and relaxation on the other.

The key to reducing brain loss with age is the ability to relax the brain -- which means allowing the mind to stop and rest. The first essential step is to become aware of our thoughts. This is the knack of meditation. Then you can experience a real surprise. Thoughts are very shy. The moment you become aware of them, they begin to dissolve, leaving behind, "the peace that passeth all understanding."

Monday, 11 November 2013

Thursday, 7 November 2013

To become aware of the human unity that we can create - and of the loving support that we can give each other - is the core of real sisterhood and brotherhood. As we lovingly begin to accept people and things as they are, we open a way for unity and harmony to be wonderfully synchronized, bringing the best situations for us and everyone around.

Stop worrying so much about what you’re trying to say, and listen for a while. Though it may seem strange, one very effective way to express yourself is by listening.

Listen, carefully, lovingly and attentively to the world around you. Listen to others and listen to life.

Let go of your assumptions about what you expect to hear. Listen not only with your ears, but also with your heart and spirit.

Pay attention to what life has to say to you. There is no end to the valuable lessons you can learn.

When you think you know it all, you deny yourself the opportunity to learn new things. When you interact with others only to impress them with how much you know, they’ll soon understand that you know very little.

The more you listen, observe and learn, the more powerfully you’ll be able to express yourself. Take heed of what life has to say, and what you learn will carry you far.

Friday, 1 November 2013

Metta Sutta

"As a mother would risk her life to protect her child, her only child, even so should one cultivate a limitless heart with regard to all beings. So with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings; radiating kindness over the entire world."

“People sit in a corner, close their eyes and concentrate, like school boys trying to concentrate on a book. That is not meditation. Meditation is something extraordinary, if you know how to do it. I am going to talk a little about it.

First of all, sit very quietly; do not force yourself to sit quietly, but sit or lie down quietly without force of any kind. Do you understand? Then watch your thinking. Watch what you are thinking about. You find you are thinking about your shoes, your saris, what you are going to say, the bird outside to which you listen; follow such thoughts and inquire why each thought arises.

Do not try to change your thinking. See why certain thoughts arise in your mind so that you begin to understand the meaning of every thought and feeling without any enforcement. And when a thought arises, do not condemn it, do not say it is right, it is wrong, it is good, it is bad. Just watch it, so that you begin to have a perception, a consciousness which is active in seeing every kind of thought, every kind of feeling.

You will know every hidden secret thought, every hidden motive, every feeling, without distortion, without saying it is right, wrong, good or bad. When you look, when you go into thought very very deeply, your mind becomes extraordinarily subtle, alive. No part of the mind is asleep. The mind is completely awake.

That is merely the foundation. Then your mind is very quiet. Your whole being becomes very still. Then go through that stillness, deeper, further – that whole process is meditation. Meditation is not to sit in a corner repeating a lot of words; or to think of a picture and go into some wild, ecstatic imaginings.

To understand the whole process of your thinking and feeling is to be free from all thought, to be free from all feeling so that your mind, your whole being becomes very quiet. And that is also part of life and with that quietness, you can look at the tree, you can look at people, you can look at the sky and the stars. That is the beauty of life.”